


Duty

by orphan_account



Category: Sharpe - All Media Types
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-12-06
Updated: 2006-12-06
Packaged: 2018-01-25 03:42:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,029
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1629674
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Celia/Lalima.  Lalima has a certain sense of duty.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Duty

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Museum T Win

 

 

Duty

There was a hardness in Celia's eyes, a firm edge of granite that presented itself without warning: a breath of England's coldness caught under the blue. _I'm not like you_ , it said. _We're worlds apart_. And they had been, they were; probably they would be again, but for now, for Lalima, the insistence was unconvincing and the hardness brittle, eroded from the inside like deadwood. For now, they were both of them women, both of them miserable, both of them captives. Wherever their pasts had placed them, for now, they were both here, and looked set to remain so.

It had often occurred to Lalima to wonder what her brother really thought of their situation, steered and smothered and stifled as he was by the white man and the minx, both - whether they knew it or not - so tiresomely emblematic of everything they had sought, as free Indians, to escape. She wondered how much he knew. He was neither slow nor gullible, but he was the ostensible heir, the focus of all attention, and that, perhaps, had blinded him with light, while Lalima, always on the sidelines, commanded a remove great enough that it lent her some sort of objective outlook. Lalima knew where danger lay, and from where she stood, Danger had thick dark hair and a cruel, mocking mouth, and went by the name of William Dodd.

Dodd. If anything tied her to Celia, it was him: that cad, that more than rogue, the man who would command and who cared little for those he would trample in the process. She knew Celia's hatred for him must be equal at least to her own; she had heard of his violations. Of course, she herself had suffered Dodd for as long as she could remember, and Celia for what amounted only to days, but all ran together in the channel of her resentment, days into nights into days without number. Celia hated him, and Lalima hated him, and that was enough, in Lalima's eyes, to unite them.

Objectively - oh, objective, again; how objective she could be, when she set her mind to it! - Objectively, Lalima could well understand Dodd's fascination with the general's daughter, English rose that she was; no dropping pink-and-white blossom, but a deep spring flower in fullest bloom, her skin touched with honey and her eyes with fire. Lalima, if she must admit it, harboured something of a fascination herself. She seemed so out of place, here, in the dust and the dirt, her blonde head like El Dorado in the city of the dead, that Lalima could not but pity her, and dwell upon her pity for its newness and its depth. And her father knowing nothing of her, and she knowing nothing of her father or his army. Oh, Celia.

There were little things that Lalima knew - things that slipped past, though they were never supposed to have been repeated, as she brushed past a soldier on a stair or in the throne-room - things overheard through a veil that concealed, but did not muffle - things that would be of interest to Celia. Lalima barely knew why the general's daughter should command so great a portion of her thoughts day by day, except because they _were_ similar; because it _was_ new, and because she did so hate Dodd. And - one must concede the 'and' - because she was so lovely. One felt she must be given whatever one could find to give, unless, like Dodd, one had no heart.

Lalima had watched her, once, one evening, having run down the stairs all full of news and doubt and heard her muttering to herself, curses under her breath in a voice that carried them surprisingly well. Lalima had watched her, pacing to and fro like a restless tigress, debating, arguing, protesting; all of these with some nameless presence visible only to herself. She had stopped, after a long while; raised a pale hand to her forehead and stood for a moment like that; poised, as if she were a statue. The moonlight fell through the grate in bars across her face. A long scratch meandered down the back of her hand, running out from between two fingers like a rivulet from a fissure in rock, down to the curve of her wrist where it lost itself in a bracelet of shadow. Her hair fell heavy and loose over her shoulders, unpinned, untamed, and uncombed; what little light there was sparked in the strands when she moved, stars in a pale net in the darkness. She stood there for a long, long time. Lalima quite forgot what it was she had been about to say, or not to say. Lalima quite forgot everything, standing in the corridor with one foot slightly raised where she had caught herself mid-step at the sound of Celia's voice. Lalima didn't know, to be absolutely truthful, whether she could ever trust herself to move again.

Oh, Celia, lovely Celia! They _were_ alike, they were; although Celia was a goddess of epic proportions, in whatever sense one chose to apply to the word. Captain Sharpe, certainly, Lalima could see, was in accordance with her on the matter. But their mutual misery, their feminine entrapment, made them brethren in Lalima's eyes, whether Celia saw it or not, and Lalima would not betray her. Lalima would help her, she swore to herself, if it was the last thing she did in this wretched place; if they killed her brother and the soldiers and her, she would do right by Celia. There were those to be called upon, if the need arose; she was not alone. _Sharpe_ , insisted a little voice in the back of her mind. The officer with the rough voice and the quick smile, a diamond in rut: the green man. Something about him drew her in precisely the same way that Dodd repelled her, suggesting to her that he had learned to understand women, at least a little, from his great experience, while Dodd's had taught him only to despise them. Well, she understood women; she understood Celia. And Celia would not find her lacking.

Lalima was a good Indian.

** END **

 

 

 


End file.
